Criticult.Com

Some places are too evil to be allowed to exist. Some cities are too wicked to be suffered.

Thus begins Dan Simmons' Song of Kali. This is the third time I have read this book, and familiarity does nothing to blunt the impact of the narrative. What begins as an academic description of the squalor in the teeming city of Calcutta soon immerses the characters and readers fully into the fetid underbelly of the most notorious city on earth.

The year is 1977, and Americans Robert Luczak, his wife Amrita, and their baby daughter Victoria journey to Calcutta so that Robert can acquire the final manuscript of a long suspected to be dead poet named M. Das. Once there he becomes embroiled in a mystery surrounding where the poet has been and why it is so important for this final poem to be published. As the mystery deepens and the Luczaks' become unwittingly pawns by a secret society that worships the goddess Kali, Robert begins to see that there may be no escaping the city's madness.

Simmons describe Calcutta in such a way that there is no room for beauty. From the alleys teeming with garbage and human waste to the upper middle class homes of the Writer's Union there is always some bit of decay that taints even the sunniest of scenes. Like all great thrillers the book begins with a sense of foreboding that becomes suffocating by the final pages. There is no happy ending, not really. There is only chaos, a mystery with no answers, or at least no rational ones.

Song of Kali is a brutal reminder of the anarchy that exists just beneath the surface of humanity. The jacket touts the novel as one the reader will never forget, and for once the blurb whores are right. Any horror fan that has yet to read Song of Kali should do so immediately. This is not a novel of things that go bump in the night and can be easily vanquished, true evil can never be defeated, only delayed.

Labels: Cannonball Read, TylerDFC